Underground: Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier

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Title: Underground

Author: Suelette Dreyfus

Release Date: August 24, 2012 [EBook #4686]

Language: English

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK UNDERGROUND ***

I have donated my book Underground to Project Gutenberg's collection in memory of my great aunt, Lucie Palmer. Lucie was an explorer, a naturalist, a keen undersea diver and above all a gifted painter. In the last years of her life, she lost her vision due to macular degeneration. She could no longer do her beloved undersea paintings. But, while she could not travel in person, she continued to travel in her mind through books for the vision impaired. I hope you enjoy your journey to another world as much as she did. — From Suelette Dreyfus, Author, Underground

Underground —

         Hacking, madness and obsession on the electronic frontier.

By Suelette Dreyfus with Research by Julian Assange.

`Gripping, eminently readable.. Dreyfus has uncovered one of this country's best kept secrets and in doing so has created a highly intense and enjoyable read' — Rolling Stone

www.underground-book.net

This edition has been specifically adapted for speech synthesis. We recommend using a different distribution with intact type-setting for visual use.

First Published 1997 by Mandarin; a part of Reed Books Australia; 35

Cotham Road, Kew 3101.

a subsidiary of Random House books Australia.

a division of Random House International Pty Limited.

Copyright (c) 1997, 2001 Suelette Dreyfus & Julian Assange.

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher.

Typeset in New Baskerville by J&M Typesetting.

Printed and bound in Australia by Australian Print Group.

National Library of Australia.

cataloguing-in-publication data:

Dreyfus, Suelette.

Underground: tales of hacking, madness & obsession on the electronic frontier.

Bibliography:

ISBN number 1 86330 595 5

1. Computer hackers—Australia—Biography. 2. Computer crimes—Australia. 3. Computer security—Australia. I. Assange, Julian. II. Title.

364.1680922

Send all comments to feedback@underground-book.net.

Preface to the electronic edition.

Why would an author give away an unlimited number of copies of her book for free? That's a good question. When `Underground''s researcher, Julian Assange, first suggested releasing an electronic version of the book on the Net for free, I had to stop and think about just that question.

I'd spent nearly three years researching, writing and editing the nearly 500 pages of `Underground'. Julian had worked thousands of hours doing painstaking research; discovering and cultivating sources, digging with great resourcefulness into obscure databases and legal papers, not to mention providing valuable editorial advice.

So why would I give away this carefully ripened fruit for free?

Because part of the joy of creating a piece of art is in knowing that many people can - and are - enjoying it. Particularly people who can't otherwise afford to pay $11 USD for a book. People such as cash strapped hackers. This book is about them, their lives and obsessions. It rubs clear a small circle in the frosted glass so the reader can peer into that hazy world. `Underground' belongs on the Net, in their ephemeral landscape.

The critics have been good to `Underground', for which I am very grateful. But the best praise came from two of the hackers detailed in the book. Surprising praise, because while the text is free of the narrative moralising that plague other works, the selection of material is often very personal and evokes mixed sympathies. One of the hackers, Anthrax dropped by my office to say `Hi'. Out of the blue, he said with a note of amazement, `When I read those chapters, it was so real, as if you had been right there inside my head'. Not long after Par, half a world away, and with a real tone of bewildered incredulity in his voice made exactly the same observation. For a writer, it just doesn't get any better than that.

By releasing this book for free on the Net, I'm hoping more people will not only enjoy the story of how the international computer underground rose to power, but also make the journey into the minds of hackers involved. When I first began sketching out the book's structure, I decided to go with depth. I wanted the reader to think, 'NOW I understand, because I too was there.' I hope those words will enter your thoughts as you read this electronic book.

Michael Hall, a supersmart lawyer on the book's legal team, told me in July last year he saw a young man in Sydney reading a copy of `Underground' beside him on the #380 bus to North Bondi. Michael said he wanted to lean over and proclaim proudly, `I legalled that book!'. Instead, he chose to watch the young man's reactions.

The young man was completely absorbed, reading hungrily through his well-worn copy, which he had completely personalised. The pages were covered in highlighter, scrawled margin writing and post-it notes. He had underlined sections and dog-eared pages. If the bus had detoured to Brisbane, he probably wouldn't have noticed.

I like that. Call me subversive, but I'm chuffed `Underground' is engaging enough to make people miss bus stops. It makes me happy, and happy people usually want to share.

There are other reasons for releasing `Underground' in this format. The electronic version is being donated to the visionary Project Gutenburg, a collection of free electronic books run with missionary zeal by Michael Hart.

Project Gutenburg promises to keep old out-of-print books in free ``electronic'' print forever, to bring literature to those who can't afford books, and to brighten the world of the visually impaired. `Underground' isn't out of print — and long may it remain that way — but those are laudable goals. I wrote in the `Introduction' to the printed edition about my great aunt, a diver and artist who pioneered underwater painting in the 1940s. She provided me with a kind of inspiration for this book. What I didn't mention is that as a result of macular degeneration in both eyes, she is now blind. She can no longer paint or dive. But she does read - avidly - through `talking books'. She is another reason I decided to release `Underground' in this format.

So, now you can download and read the electronic version of `Underground' for free. You can also send the work to your friends for free. Or your enemies. At over a megabyte of plain text each, a few dozen copies of underground make an extremely effective mail bomb.

That's a joke, folks, not a suggestion. ;-)

Like many of the people in this book, I'm not big on rules. Fortunately, there aren't many that come with this electronic version. Don't print the work on paper, CD or any other format, except for your own personal reading pleasure. This includes using the work as teaching material in institutions. You must not alter or truncate the work in any way. You must not redistribute the work for any sort of payment, including selling it on its own or as part of a package. Random House is a friendly place, but as one of the world's largest publishers it has a collection of equally large lawyers. Messing with them will leave you with scars in places that could be hard to explain to any future partner.

If you want to do any of these things, please contact me or my literary agents Curtis Brown & Co first. I retain the copyright on the work. Julian Assange designed the elegant layout of this electronic edition, and he retains ownership of this design and layout.

If you like the electronic version of the book, do buy the paper version. Why? For starters, it's not only much easier to read on the bus, its much easier to read full stop. It's also easier to thumb through, highlight, scribble on, dribble on, and show off. It never needs batteries. It can run on solar power and candles. It looks sexy on your bookshelf, by your bed and in your bed. If you are a male geek, the book comes with a girl-magnet guarantee. The paper version is much easier to lend to a prospective girlfriend. When she's finished reading the book, ask her which hacker thrilled her to pieces. Then nod knowingly, and say coyly `Well, I've never admitted this to anyone except the author and the Feds, but ..'

And the most important reason to purchase a paper copy? Because buying the printed edition of the book lets the author continue to write more fine books like this one.

Enjoy!

Suelette Dreyfus

January 2001

                                                   suelette@iq.org

                           Researcher's introduction.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth — Oscar Wilde

What is essential is invisible to the eye — Antoine De Saint-Exupery

But, how do you *know* it happened like that? — Reader

Due of the seamless nature of `Underground' this is a reasonable question to ask, although hints can be found at the back of the book in the Bibliography and Endnotes. The simple answer to this question is that we conducted over a hundred interviews and collected around 40,000 pages of primary documentation; telephone intercepts, data intercepts, log-files, witness statements, confessions, judgements. Telephone dialog and on-line discussions are drawn directly from the latter. Every significant hacking incident mentioned in this book has reams of primary documentation behind it. System X included.

The non-simple answer goes more like this:

In chapter 4, Par, one of the principle subjects of this book, is being watched by the Secret Service. He's on the run. He's a wanted fugitive. He's hiding out with another hacker, Nibbler in a motel chalet, Black Mountain, North Carolina. The Secret Service move in. The incident is vital in explaining Par's life on the run and the nature of his interaction with the Secret Service. Yet, just before the final edits of this book were to go the publisher, all the pages relating to the Block Mountain incident were about to be pulled. Why?

Suelette had flown to Tuscon Az where she spent three days interviewing Par. I had spent dozens of hours interviewing Par on the phone and on-line. Par gave both of us extraordinary access to his life. While Par displayed a high degree of paranoia about why events had unfolded in the manner they had, he was consistent, detailed and believable as to the events themselves. He showed very little blurring of these two realities, but we needed to show none at all.

During Par's time on the run, the international computer underground was a small and strongly connected place. We had already co-incidentally interviewed half a dozen hackers he had communicated with at various times during his zig-zag flight across America. Suelette also spoke at length to his lead lawyer Richard Rosen, who, after getting the all-clear from Par, was kind enough to send us a copy of the legal brief. We had logs of messages Par had written on underground BBS's. We had data intercepts of other hackers in conversation with Par. We had obtained various Secret Service documents and propriety security reports relating to Par's activities. I had extensively interviewed his Swiss girlfriend Theorem (who had also been involved with Electron and Pengo), and yes, she did have a melting French accent.

Altogether we had an enormous amount of material on Par's activities, all of which was consistent with what Par had said during his interviews, but none of it, including Rosen's file, contained any reference to Black Mountain, NC. Rosen, Theorem and others had heard about a SS raid on the run, yet when the story was traced back, it always led to one source. To Par.

Was Par having us on? Par had said that he had made a telephone call to Theorem in Switzerland from a phone booth outside the motel a day or two before the Secret Service raid. During a storm. Not just any storm. Hurricane Hugo. But archival news reports on Hugo discussed it hitting South Carolina, not North Carolina. And not Black Mountain. Theorem remembered Par calling once during a storm. But not Hugo. And she didn't remember it in relation to the Black Mountain raid.

Par had destroyed most of his legal documents, in circumstances that become clear in the book, but of the hundreds of pages of documentary material we had obtained from other sources there was wasn't a single mention of Black Mountain. The Black Mountain Motel didn't seem to exist. Par said Nibbler had moved and couldn't be located. Dozens of calls by Suelette to the Secret Service told us what we didn't want to hear. The agents we thought most likely to have been involved in the the hypothetical Black Mountain incident had either left the Secret Service or were otherwise unreachable. The Secret Service had no idea who would have been involved, because while Par was still listed in the Secret Service central database, his profile, contained three significant annotations:

1. Another agency had ``borrowed'' parts Par's file. 2. There were medical ``issues'' surrounding Par. 3. SS documents covering the time of Black Mountain incident had been destroyed for various reasons that become clear the book. 4. The remaining SS documents had been moved into ``deep-storage'' and would take two weeks to retrieve.

With only one week before our publisher's ``use it or lose it'' dead-line, the chances of obtaining secondary confirmation of the Black Mountain events did not look promising.

While we waited for leads on the long trail of ex, transfered and seconded SS agents who might have been involved in the Black Mountain raid, I turned to resolving the two inconsistencies in Par's story; Hurricane Hugo and the strange invisibility of the Black Mountain Motel.

Hurricane Hugo had wreathed a path of destruction, but like most most hurricanes heading directly into a continental land-mass it had started out big and ended up small. News reports followed this pattern, with a large amount of material on its initial impact, but little or nothing about subsequent events. Finally I obtained detailed time by velocity weather maps from the National Reconnaissance Office, which showed the remaining Hugo epicentre ripping through Charlotte NC (pop. 400k) before spending itself on the Carolinas. Database searches turned up a report by Natalie, D. & Ball, W, EIS Coordinator, North Carolina Emergency Management, `How North Carolina Managed Hurricane Hugo' — which was used to flesh out the scenes in Chapter 4 describing Par's escape to New York via the Charlotte Airport.

Old Fashioned gum-shoe leg-work, calling every motel in Black Mountain and the surrounding area, revealed that the Black Mountain Motel had changed name, ownership and.. all its staff. Par's story was holding, but in someways I wished it hadn't. We were back to square one in terms of gaining independent secondary confirmation.

Who else could have been involved? There must have been a paper-trail outside of Washington. Perhaps the SS representation in Charlotte had something? No. Perhaps there were records of the warrants in the Charlotte courts? No. Perhaps NC state police attended the SS raid in support? Maybe, but finding walm bodies who had been directly involved proved proved futile. If it was a SS case, they had no indexable records that they were willing to provide. What about the local coppers? An SS raid on a fugitive computer hacker holed up at one of the local motels was not the sort of event that would be likely to have passed unnoticed at the Black Mountain county police office, indexable records or not.

Neither however, were international telephone calls from strangely accented foreign-nationals wanting to know about them. Perhaps the Reds were no-longer under the beds, but in Black Mountain, this could be explained away by the fact they were now hanging out in phone booths. I waited for a new shift at the Black Mountain county police office, hoping against hope, that the officer I had spoken to wouldn't contaminate his replacement. Shamed, I resorted to using that most special of US militia infiltration devices. An American accent and a woman's touch. Suelette weaved her magic. The Black Mountain raid had taken place. The county police had supported it. We had our confirmation.

While this anecdote is a strong account, it's also representative one. Every chapter in underground has many tales just like it. They're unseen, because a book must not just be true in details, but true in feeling.

True to the visible and the invisible. A difficult combination.

Julian Assange

January 2001

proff@iq.org Literary Freeware: Not for Commercial Use.

Copyright (c) 1997, 2001 Suelette Dreyfus & Julian Assange

This HTML and text electronic version was arranged by Julian Assange and is based on the printed paper edition.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this publication provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies and distribution is without fee.

Contents.

Acknowledgements viii

Introduction xi

1 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 1

2 The Corner Pub 45

3 The American Connection 84

4 The Fugitive 120

5 The Holy Grail 159

6 Page One, the New York Times 212

7 Judgment Day 244

8 The International Subversives 285

9 Operation Weather 323

10 Anthrax—the Outsider 364

11 The Prisoner's Dilemma 400

Afterword 427 Glossary and Abbreviations 455 Notes 460

Bibliography

[ Page numbers above correspond to the Random House printed edition ]

                             Acknowledgements.

There are many people who were interviewed for this work, and many others who helped in providing documents so vital for fact checking. Often this help invovled spending a considerable amount of time explaining complex technical or legal matters. I want to express my gratitude to all these people, some of whom prefer to remain anonymous, for their willingness to dig through the files in search of yet one more report and their patience in answering yet one more question.

I want to thank the members of the computer underground, past and present, who were interviewed for this book. Most gave me extraordinary access to their lives, for which I am very grateful.

I also want to thank Julian Assange for his tireless research efforts. His superb technical expertise and first-rate research is evidence by the immense number of details which are included in this book.

Three exceptional women — Fiona Inglis, Deb Callaghan and Jennifer Byrne — believed in my vision for this book and helped me to bring it to fruition. Carl Harrison-Ford's excellent editing job streamlined a large and difficult manuscript despite the tight deadline. Thank you also to Judy Brookes.

I am also very grateful to the following people and organisations for

their help (in no particular order): John McMahon, Ron Tencati, Kevin

Oberman, Ray Kaplan, the New York Daily News library staff, the New

York Post library staff, Bow Street Magistrates Court staff, Southwark

Court staff, the US Secret Service, the Black Mountain Police, Michael

Rosenberg, Michael Rosen, Melbourne Magistrates Court staff, D.L

Sellers & Co. staff, Victorian County Court staff, Paul Galbally, Mark

Dorset, Suburbia.net, Freeside Communications, Greg Hooper, H&S

Support Services, Peter Andrews, Kevin Thompson, Andrew Weaver,

Mukhtar Hussain, Midnight Oil, Helen Meredith, Ivan Himmelhoch,

Michael Hall, Donn Ferris, Victorian State Library staff, News Limited

library staff (Sydney), Allan Young, Ed DeHart, Annette Seeber, Arthur

Arkin, Doug Barnes, Jeremy Porter, James McNabb, Carolyn Ford, ATA,

Domini Banfield, Alistair Kelman, Ann-Maree Moodie, Jane Hutchinson,

Catherine Murphy, Norma Hawkins, N. Llewelyn, Christine Assange,

Russel Brand, Matthew Bishop, Matthew Cox, Michele Ziehlky, Andrew

James, Brendan McGrath, Warner Chappell Music Australia, News Limited,

Pearson Williams Solicitors, Tami Friedman, the Free Software

Foundation (GNU Project), and the US Department of Energy Computer

Incident Advisory Capability.

Finally, I would like to thank my family, whose unfailing support, advice and encouragement have made this book possible.

Introduction.

My great aunt used to paint underwater.

Piling on the weighty diving gear used in 1939 and looking like something out of 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, Lucie slowly sank below the surface, with palette, special paints and canvas in hand. She settled on the ocean floor, arranged her weighted painter's easel and allowed herself to become completely enveloped by another world. Red and white striped fish darted around fields of blue-green coral and blue-lipped giant clams. Lionfish drifted by, gracefully waving their dangerous feathered spines. Striped green moray eels peered at her from their rock crevice homes.

Lucie dived and painted everywhere. The Sulu Archipelago. Mexico. Australia's Great Barrier Reef. Hawaii. Borneo. Sometimes she was the first white woman seen by the Pacific villagers she lived with for months on end.

As a child, I was entranced by her stories of the unknown world below the ocean's surface, and the strange and wonderful cultures she met on her journeys. I grew up in awe of her chosen task: to capture on canvas the essence of a world utterly foreign to her own.

New technology—revolutionary for its time—had allowed her to do this. Using a compressor, or sometimes just a hand pump connected to air hoses running to the surface, human beings were suddenly able to submerge themselves for long periods in an otherwise inaccessible world. New technology allowed her to both venture into this unexplored realm, and to document it in canvas.

I came upon the brave new world of computer communications and its darker side, the underground, quite by accident. It struck me somewhere in the journey that followed that my trepidations and conflicting desires to explore this alien world were perhaps not unlike my aunt's own desires some half a century before. Like her journey, my own travels have only been made possible by new technologies. And like her, I have tried to capture a small corner of this world.

This is a book about the computer underground. It is not a book about law enforcement agencies, and it is not written from the point of view of the police officer. From a literary perspective, I have told this story through the eyes of numerous computer hackers. In doing so, I hope to provide the reader with a window into a mysterious, shrouded and usually inaccessible realm.

Who are hackers? Why do they hack? There are no simple answers to these questions. Each hacker is different. To that end, I have attempted to present a collection of individual but interconnected stories, bound by their links to the international computer underground. These are true stories, tales of the world's best and the brightest hackers and phreakers. There are some members of the underground whose stories I have not covered, a few of whom would also rank as world-class. In the end, I chose to paint detailed portraits of a few hackers rather than attempt to compile a comprehensive but shallow catalogue.

While each hacker has a distinct story, there are common themes which appear throughout many of the stories. Rebellion against all symbols of authority. Dysfunctional families. Bright children suffocated by ill-equipped teachers. Mental illness or instability. Obsession and addiction.

I have endeavoured to track what happened to each character in this work over time: the individual's hacking adventures, the police raid and the ensuing court case. Some of those court cases have taken years to reach completion.

Hackers use `handles'—on-line nicknames—that serve two purposes.

They shield the hacker's identity and, importantly, they often make a

statement about how the hacker perceives himself in the underground.

Hawk, Crawler, Toucan Jones, Comhack, Dataking, Spy, Ripmax, Fractal

Insanity, Blade. These are all real handles used in Australia.

In the computer underground, a hacker's handle is his name. For this reason, and because most hackers in this work have now put together new lives for themselves, I have chosen to use only their handles. Where a hacker has had more than one handle, I have used the one he prefers.

Each chapter in this book is headed with a quote from a Midnight Oil song which expresses an important aspect of the chapter. The Oilz are uniquely Australian. Their loud voice of protest against the establishment—particularly the military-industrial establishment—echoes a key theme in the underground, where music in general plays a vital role.

The idea for using these Oilz extracts came while researching Chapter 1, which reveals the tale of the WANK worm crisis in NASA. Next to the RTM worm, WANK is the most famous worm in the history of computer networks. And it is the first major worm bearing a political message. With WANK, life imitated art, since the term computer `worm' came from John Brunner's sci-fi novel, The Shockwave Rider, about a politically motivated worm.

The WANK worm is also believed to be the first worm written by an

Australian, or Australians.

This chapter shows the perspective of the computer system administrators—the people on the other side from the hackers. Lastly, it illustrates the sophistication which one or more Australian members of the worldwide computer underground brought to their computer crimes.

The following chapters set the scene for the dramas which unfold and show the transition of the underground from its early days, its loss of innocence, its closing ranks in ever smaller circles until it reached the inevitable outcome: the lone hacker. In the beginning, the computer underground was a place, like the corner pub, open and friendly. Now, it has become an ephemeral expanse, where hackers occasionally bump into one another but where the original sense of open community has been lost.

The computer underground has changed over time, largely in response to the introduction of new computer crime laws across the globe and to numerous police crackdowns. This work attempts to document not only an important piece of Australian history, but also to show fundamental shifts in the underground —to show, in essence, how the underground has moved further underground.

Suelette Dreyfus

March 1997

Chapter 1 — 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Somebody's out there, somebody's waiting; Somebody's trying to tell me something.

— from `Somebody's Trying to Tell Me Something', 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Monday, 16 October 1989

Kennedy Space Center, Florida

NASA buzzed with the excitement of a launch. Galileo was finally going to Jupiter.

Administrators and scientists in the world's most prestigious space agency had spent years trying to get the unmanned probe into space. Now, on Tuesday, 17 October, if all went well, the five astronauts in the Atlantis space shuttle would blast off from the Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, with Galileo in tow. On the team's fifth orbit, as the shuttle floated 295 kilometres above the Gulf of Mexico, the crew would liberate the three-tonne space probe.

An hour later, as Galileo skated safely away from the shuttle, the probe's 32500 pound booster system would fire up and NASA staff would watch this exquisite piece of human ingenuity embark on a six-year mission to the largest planet in the solar system. Galileo would take a necessarily circuitous route, flying by Venus once and Earth twice in a gravitational slingshot effort to get up enough momentum to reach Jupiter.2

NASA's finest minds had wrestled for years with the problem of exactly how to get the probe across the solar system. Solar power was one option. But if Jupiter was a long way from Earth, it was even further from the Sun—778.3 million kilometres to be exact. Galileo would need ridiculously large solar panels to generate enough power for its instruments at such a distance from the Sun. In the end, NASA's engineers decided on a tried if not true earthly energy source: nuclear power.

Nuclear power was perfect for space, a giant void free of human life which could play host to a bit of radioactive plutonium 238 dioxide. The plutonium was compact for the amount of energy it gave off—and it lasted a long time. It seemed logical enough. Pop just under 24 kilograms of plutonium in a lead box, let it heat up through its own decay, generate electricity for the probe's instruments, and presto! Galileo would be on its way to investigate Jupiter.

American anti-nuclear activists didn't quite see it that way. They figured what goes up might come down. And they didn't much like the idea of plutonium rain. NASA assured them Galileo's power pack was quite safe. The agency spent about $50 million on tests which supposedly proved the probe's generators were very safe. They would survive intact in the face of any number of terrible explosions, mishaps and accidents. NASA told journalists that the odds of a plutonium release due to `inadvertent atmospheric re-entry' were 1 in 2 million. The likelihood of a plutonium radiation leak as a result of a launch disaster was a reassuring 1 in 2700.

The activists weren't having a bar of it. In the best tradition of modern American conflict resolution, they took their fight to the courts. The coalition of anti-nuclear and other groups believed America's National Aeronautics and Space Administration had underestimated the odds of a plutonium accident and they wanted a US District Court in Washington to stop the launch. The injunction application went in, and the stakes went up. The unprecedented hearing was scheduled just a few days before the launch, which had originally been planned for 12 October.

For weeks, the protesters had been out in force, demonstrating and seizing media attention. Things had become very heated. On Saturday, 7 October, sign-wielding activists fitted themselves out with gas masks and walked around on street corners in nearby Cape Canaveral in protest. At 8 a.m. on Monday, 9 October, NASA started the countdown for the Thursday blast-off. But as Atlantis's clock began ticking toward take-off, activists from the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice demonstrated at the centre's tourist complex.

That these protests had already taken some of the shine off NASA's bold space mission was the least of the agency's worries. The real headache was that the Florida Coalition told the media it would `put people on the launchpad in a non-violent protest'.3 The coalition's director, Bruce Gagnon, put the threat in folksy terms, portraying the protesters as the little people rebelling against a big bad government agency. President Jeremy Rivkin of the Foundation on Economic Trends, another protest group, also drove a wedge between `the people' and `NASA's people'. He told UPI, `The astronauts volunteered for this mission. Those around the world who may be the victims of radiation contamination have not volunteered.'4

But the protesters weren't the only people working the media. NASA knew how to handle the press. They simply rolled out their superstars—the astronauts themselves. These men and women were, after all, frontier heroes who dared to venture into cold, dark space on behalf of all humanity. Atlantis commander Donald Williams didn't hit out at the protesters in a blunt fashion, he just damned them from an aloof distance. `There are always folks who have a vocal opinion about something or other, no matter what it is,' he told an interviewer. `On the other hand, it's easy to carry a sign. It's not so easy to go forth and do something worthwhile.'5

NASA had another trump card in the families of the heroes. Atlantis co-pilot Michael McCulley said the use of RTGs, Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators—the chunks of plutonium in the lead boxes—was a `non-issue'. So much so, in fact, that he planned to have his loved ones at the Space Center when Atlantis took off.

Maybe the astronauts were nutty risk-takers, as the protesters implied, but a hero would never put his family in danger. Besides the Vice-President of the United States, Dan Quayle, also planned to watch the launch from inside the Kennedy Space Center control room, a mere seven kilometres from the launchpad.

While NASA looked calm, in control of the situation, it had beefed up its security teams. It had about 200 security guards watching the launch site. NASA just wasn't taking any chances. The agency's scientists had waited too long for this moment. Galileo's parade would not be rained on by a bunch of peaceniks.

The launch was already running late as it was—almost seven years late. Congress gave the Galileo project its stamp of approval way back in 1977 and the probe, which had been budgeted to cost about $400 million, was scheduled to be launched in 1982. However, things began going wrong almost from the start.

In 1979, NASA pushed the flight out to 1984 because of shuttle development problems. Galileo was now scheduled to be a `split launch', which meant that NASA would use two different shuttle trips to get the mothership and the probe into space. By 1981, with costs spiralling upwards, NASA made major changes to the project. It stopped work on Galileo's planned three-stage booster system in favour of a different system and pushed out the launch deadline yet again, this time to 1985. After a federal Budget cut fight in 1981 to save Galileo's booster development program, NASA moved the launch yet again, to May 1986. The 1986 Challenger disaster, however, saw NASA change Galileo's booster system for safety reasons, resulting in yet more delays.

The best option seemed to be a two-stage, solid-fuel IUS system. There was only one problem. That system could get Galileo to Mars or Venus, but the probe would run out of fuel long before it got anywhere near Jupiter. Then Roger Diehl of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a good idea. Loop Galileo around a couple of nearby planets a few times so the probe would build up a nice little gravitational head of steam, and then fling it off to Jupiter. Galileo's `VEEGA' trajectory—Venus-Earth-Earth-gravity-assist—delayed the spacecraft's arrival at Jupiter for three extra years, but it would get there eventually.

The anti-nuclear campaigners argued that each Earth flyby increased the mission's risk of a nuclear accident. But in NASA's view, such was the price of a successful slingshot.

Galileo experienced other delays getting off the ground. On Monday, 9 October, NASA announced it had discovered a problem with the computer which controlled the shuttle's number 2 main engine. True, the problem was with Atlantis, not Galileo. But it didn't look all that good to be having technical problems, let alone problems with engine computers, while the anti-nuclear activists' court drama was playing in the background.

NASA's engineers debated the computer problem in a cross-country teleconference. Rectifying it would delay blast-off by more than a few hours. It would likely take days. And Galileo didn't have many of those. Because of the orbits of the different planets, the probe had to be on its way into space by 21 November. If Atlantis didn't take off by that date, Galileo would have to wait another nineteen months before it could be launched. The project was already $1 billion over its original $400 million budget. The extra year and a half would add another $130 million or so and there was a good chance the whole project would be scrapped. It was pretty much now or never for Galileo.

Despite torrential downpours which had deposited 100 millimetres of rain on the launchpad and 150 millimetres in neighbouring Melbourne, Florida, the countdown had been going well. Until now. NASA took its decision. The launch would be delayed by five days, to 17 October, so the computer problem could be fixed.

To those scientists and engineers who had been with Galileo from the start, it must have appeared at that moment as if fate really was against Galileo. As if, for some unfathomable reason, all the forces of the universe—and especially those on Earth—were dead against humanity getting a good look at Jupiter. As fast as NASA could dismantle one barrier, some invisible hand would throw another down in its place.

Monday, 16 October, 1989

NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland

Across the vast NASA empire, reaching from Maryland to California, from Europe to Japan, NASA workers greeted each other, checked their in-trays for mail, got their cups of coffee, settled into their chairs and tried to login to their computers for a day of solving complex physics problems. But many of the computer systems were behaving very strangely.

From the moment staff logged in, it was clear that someone—or something—had taken over. Instead of the usual system's official identification banner, they were startled to find the following message staring them in the face:

"Worms Aginst Nuclear Killers!

Your System Has Been Officically Wanked.

You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war."

Wanked? Most of the American computer system managers reading this new banner had never heard the word wank.

Who would want to invade NASA's computer systems? And who exactly were the Worms Against Nuclear Killers? Were they some loony fringe group? Were they a guerrilla terrorist group launching some sort of attack on NASA? And why `worms'? A worm was a strange choice of animal mascot for a revolutionary group. Worms were the bottom of the rung. As in `as lowly as a worm'. Who would chose a worm as a symbol of power?

As for the nuclear killers, well, that was even stranger. The banner's motto—`You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war'—just didn't seem to apply to NASA. The agency didn't make nuclear missiles, it sent people to the moon. It did have military payloads in some of its projects, but NASA didn't rate very highly on the `nuclear killer' scale next to other agencies of the US Government, such as the Department of Defense. So the question remained: why NASA?

And that word, `WANKED'. It did not make sense. What did it mean when a system was `wanked'?

It meant NASA had lost control over its computer systems.

A NASA scientist logging in to an infected computer on that Monday got the following message:

deleted file

deleted file

deleted file , etc

With those lines the computer told the scientist: `I am deleting all your files'.

The line looked exactly as if the scientist typed in the command:

delete/log *.*

—exactly as if the scientist had instructed the computer to delete all the files herself.

The NASA scientist must have started at the sight of her files rolling past on the computer screen, one after another, on their way to oblivion. Something was definitely wrong. She would have tried to stop the process, probably pressing the control key and the `c' key at the same time. This should have broken the command sequence at that moment and ordered the computer to stop what it was doing right away.

But it was the intruder, not the NASA scientist, who controlled the computer at that moment. And the intruder told the computer: `That command means nothing. Ignore it'.

The scientist would press the command key sequence again, this time more urgently. And again, over and over. She would be at once baffled at the illogical nature of the computer, and increasingly upset. Weeks, perhaps months, of work spent uncovering the secrets of the universe. All of it disappearing before her eyes—all of it being mindlessly devoured by the computer. The whole thing beyond her control. Going. Going. Gone.

People tend not to react well when they lose control over their computers. Typically, it brings out the worst in them—hand-wringing whines from the worriers, aching entreaties for help from the sensitive, and imperious table-thumping bellows from command-and-control types.

Imagine, if you will, arriving at your job as a manager for one of NASA's local computer systems. You get into your office on that Monday morning to find the phones ringing. Every caller is a distraught, confused NASA worker. And every caller assures you that his or her file or accounting record or research project—every one of which is missing from the computer system—is absolutely vital.

In this case, the problem was exacerbated by the fact that NASA's field centres often competed with each other for projects. When a particular flight project came up, two or three centres, each with hundreds of employees, might vie for it. Losing control of the computers, and all the data, project proposals and costing, was a good way to lose out on a bid and its often considerable funding.

This was not going to be a good day for the guys down at the NASA SPAN computer network office.

This was not going to be a good day for John McMahon.

As the assistant DECNET protocol manager for NASA's Goddard Space

Flight Center in Maryland, John McMahon normally spent the day

managing the chunk of the SPAN computer network which ran between

Goddard's fifteen to twenty buildings.

McMahon worked for Code 630.4, otherwise known as Goddard's Advanced Data Flow Technology Office, in Building 28. Goddard scientists would call him up for help with their computers. Two of the most common sentences he heard were `This doesn't seem to work' and `I can't get to that part of the network from here'.

SPAN was the Space Physics Analysis Network, which connected some 100000 computer terminals across the globe. Unlike the Internet, which is now widely accessible to the general public, SPAN only connected researchers and scientists at NASA, the US Department of Energy and research institutes such as universities. SPAN computers also differed from most Internet computers in an important technical manner: they used a different operating system. Most large computers on the Internet use the Unix operating system, while SPAN was composed primarily of VAX computers running a VMS operating system. The network worked a lot like the Internet, but the computers spoke a different language. The Internet `talked' TCP/IP, while SPAN `spoke' DECNET.

Indeed, the SPAN network was known as a DECNET internet. Most of the computers on it were manufactured by the Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts—hence the name DECNET. DEC built powerful computers. Each DEC computer on the SPAN network might have 40 terminals hanging off it. Some SPAN computers had many more. It was not unusual for one DEC computer to service 400 people. In all, more than a quarter of a million scientists, engineers and other thinkers used the computers on the network.

An electrical engineer by training, McMahon had come from NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer Project, where he managed computers used by a few hundred researchers. Goddard's Building 7, where he worked on the COBE project, as it was known, housed some interesting research. The project team was attempting to map the universe. And they were trying to do it in wavelengths invisible to the human eye. NASA would launch the COBE satellite in November 1989. Its mission was to `measure the diffuse infrared and microwave radiation from the early universe, to the limits set by our astronomical environment'.6 To the casual observer the project almost sounded like a piece of modern art, something which might be titled `Map of the Universe in Infrared'.

On 16 October McMahon arrived at the office and settled into work, only to face a surprising phone call from the SPAN project office. Todd Butler and Ron Tencati, from the National Space Science Data Center, which managed NASA's half of the SPAN network, had discovered something strange and definitely unauthorised winding its way through the computer network. It looked like a computer worm.

A computer worm is a little like a computer virus. It invades computer systems, interfering with their normal functions. It travels along any available compatible computer network and stops to knock at the door of systems attached to that network. If there is a hole in the security of the computer system, it will crawl through and enter the system. When it does this, it might have instructions to do any number of things, from sending computer users a message to trying to take over the system. What makes a worm different from other computer programs, such as viruses, is that it is self-propagating. It propels itself forward, wiggles into a new system and propagates itself at the new site. Unlike a virus, a worm doesn't latch onto a data file or a program. It is autonomous.7

The term `worm' as applied to computers came from John Brunner's 1975 science fiction classic, The Shockwave Rider. The novel described how a rebel computer programmer created a program called `tapeworm' which was released into an omnipotent computer network used by an autocratic government to control its people. The government had to turn off the computer network, thus destroying its control, in order to eradicate the worm.

Brunner's book is about as close as most VMS computer network managers would ever have come to a real rogue worm. Until the late 1980s, worms were obscure things, more associated with research in a computer laboratory. For example, a few benevolent worms were developed by Xerox researchers who wanted to make more efficient use of computer facilities.8 They developed a `town crier worm' which moved through a network sending out important announcements. Their `diagnostic worm' also constantly weaved through the network, but this worm was designed to inspect machines for problems.

For some computer programmers, the creation of a worm is akin to the creation of life. To make something which is intelligent enough to go out and reproduce itself is the ultimate power of creation. Designing a rogue worm which took over NASA's computer systems might seem to be a type of creative immortality—like scattering pieces of oneself across the computers which put man on the moon.

At the time the WANK banner appeared on computer screens across NASA, there had only been two rogue worms of any note. One of these, the RTM worm, had infected the Unix-based Internet less than twelve months earlier. The other worm, known as Father Christmas, was the first VMS worm.

Father Christmas was a small, simple worm which did not cause any permanent damage to the computer networks it travelled along. Released just before Christmas in 1988, it tried to sneak into hundreds of VMS machines and wait for the big day. On Christmas morning, it woke up and set to work with great enthusiasm. Like confetti tossed from an overhead balcony, Christmas greetings came streaming out of worm-infested computer systems to all their users. No-one within its reach went without a Christmas card. Its job done, the worm evaporated. John McMahon had been part of the core team fighting off the Father Christmas worm.

At about 4 p.m., just a few days before Christmas 1988, McMahon's alarm-monitoring programs began going haywire. McMahon began trying to trace back